Tuesday, 26 March 2013

You may find that sometimes you need to use the Sun Java 6 version of the JDK as opposed to version 7 on your Centos box. Some projects may require the older version, additionally there are still some potential security issues in version 7 which regularly render Oracle as reminiscent of the boy with his finger in the dam. Until these are properly fixed you may wish to use JDK6 instead of or at least alongside JDK7. Well this is easy enough to do on Centos 6/RHEL with a few commands.

First install jpackage-utils if not already installed

$ sudo yum -y install jpackage-utils Now we have to download JDK6 from Oracle's Web site.The latest version is 1.6.0_43 so download the bin version for Linux to your home directory. First change the permissions.$ chmod +x jdk-6u43-linux-i586.bin (or x64)

Extract the bin file$ ./jdk-6u43-linux-i586.binMove extracted folder to its location, usually /usr/java

If you don't aready have a java version installed, then you might want to make a directory for it.

$ sudo mkdir /usr/java $ sudo mv jdk1.6.0_43 /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_43If you have already installed JDK7 then you will have a new folder next to it with version 6 inside, that is fine.Install the new java 6 source in system

Friday, 15 March 2013

We have seen a wider range of Digital Image Processing apps become available on Linux as coders and developers find that there is a growing demand within the community for quality programs. Whilst Gimp and Cinepaint have been around for a while, digiKam is a relatively new kid on the block, packing considerable functionality within its multi colored GUI.digiKam is an open source cross platform photo management program designed to import, organize, enhance, search and export your digital images to and from your computer. The design is inspired by photographers with real needs not addressed in other applications, and solutions which are implemented with aplomb.

Support of multiple root album paths (no more importing into one giant album);

Thumbnail-bar integration for easy navigation and editing;

Supports the latest camera RAW files using LibRaw;

New/revamped tools:

Batch queue manager;

Revamped camera import wizard;

LensFun integration: auto-correction of lens distortion;

Fuzzy searches based on hand-drawn sketches;

Advanced searches using image meta-information, such as keywords and dates;

User-friendly map searching that gives you the power to search for global photo locations;

Advanced searches for duplicate and similar images;

Using two modes, View and Edit, it defaults to the View mode.

With Color, Enhance, Transform, Decorate and Filters tabs (accessed via Image, then Edit tab) in the Edit mode, I would recommend taking a look at the program if you are a photo enthusiast using Linux, as there will be features of it you are bound to like. As inferred in the opening paragraph, multiple themes are available from the settings menu and it can be made to suit the majority of color schemes, both light and dark. It is no Photoshop but has some pretty powerful and impressive features for a free program.

Having only basic photography skills I nonetheless managed to find some useful features in digiKam and I'm sure the more inquisitive, adventurous and professional user would find more.Installing is easy on Centos 6/RHEL as it is in the Epel repo, so make sure you have it enabled and issue$sudo yum -y install digikam digikam-devel digikam-libsTo obtain all packages, and run it with

Sunday, 10 March 2013

According
to Robin Rowe at the Greater London Linux Users Group in Dec 2012,
Linux is the #1 operating system for feature animation
and visual effects. It is used by all the major studios for their
film making, and Cinepaint is the most popular image editing software
in the industry after Photoshop.

Now based on GTK as opposed to the earlier FLTK, release's for
Linux, Mac and Windows see Cinepaint solidify it's place in the Open Source community whilst retaining its individual idiosyncratic persona.

CinePaint was created by using an existing open source paint app which had been abandoned by the developers, cleverly replacing its old low fidelity 8-bit core with an image engine that handles 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit high dynamic range channels. Some of the features include

Support for 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit color channels of deep paint.

High fidelity image file types such as DPX, OpenEXR and 16-bit TIFF. These files can’t be opened in ordinary 8-bit image applications without crushing them.

High Dynamic Range. HDR images can go brighter than white. Ordinary images can’t be brighter than a white sheet of paper (0=black, 1.0=white).

Gallery-quality printing. B&W photographs have only one color channel and degrade quickly when manipulated as 8-bit images.CinePaint has higher fidelity and offers a 16-bit printing path to the print-head using GutenPrint.

Open Source. With various OSS licenses, as it uses code from various sources, including GPL, LGPL, BSD, and MPL.

Free.

With a large selection of tools for deep paint manipulation and image processing it is quite a useful program and one of the better ones you will find for use on Linux.CinePaint is used for motion picture frame-by-frame retouching, dirt removal, wire rig removal, render repair, background plates, and 3d model textures. It has been deployed on a number of feature films, including The Last Samurai, in which it was used to add the flying arrows. It's also being used by pro photographers who need better color fidelity than is available in other tools.Installation on Centos is simple thanks again to the guys at Nux Dextop, with a simple binary package download, the nux-dextop version is currently 0.25.0. To obtain nux-dextop first install wget if not installed.$ sudo yum -y install wget $ wget http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/dextop/el6/i386/nux-dextop-release-0-1.el6.nux.noarch.rpmor$ wget http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/dextop/el6/x86_64/nux-dextop-release-0-1.el6.nux.noarch.rpmfor the repo pack $ sudo rpm -Uvh nux-dextop-release-0-1.el6.nux.noarch.rpmto install it.$ sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/nux-dextop.repo set 'enabled' to '0'$ sudo yum -y --enablerepo=nux-dextop install cinepaintSetting up Install ProcessPackage cinepaint-0.25.0-0.1.el6.nux.i686 already installed and latest versionNothing to doI already have it but you should get 2 packages and be done.Simply run it with$ cinepaint
See Fluxbox key bindings if you are using Fluxbox.
Cinepaint is a pretty useful addition to your Centos/RHEL boxwith a wide range of innovative and interesting features.

Monday, 4 March 2013

Many people treat their viewing of the fiction and fantasy turned out by the Movie and TV industries as a religious ceremony, kitting themselves out with all sorts of state of the art sound equipment and the now obligatory enormous screens.Others, like me, don't find it so interesting to watch just another remake of an old remade remake from early last century which doesn't really tell us anything about what is actually happening in the world and are more likely to just watch the occasional clip to help them get to sleep.Whichever of the two categories you place yourself in, if you are using Centos 6/RHEL then you will probably be interested in Arista Video Transcoder, a nice little program based on GTK and Gstreamer written in Python by Daniel Taylor.

It has been available for a while, appearing on Ubuntu Desktop versions but makes a nice addition to Centos 6/RHEL.FFmpeg afficiados may frown upon the idea, but Arista is a clever little encoder for busy people, and boasts a LARGE range of presets covering practically every device on the planet and a fair proportion of devices available on OTHER planets.Features include

Automatically discover available DVD drives and media

Rip straight from DVD media easily

Automatically discover and record from Video4Linux devices

Support for H.264, WebM, FLV, Ogg, DivX and more

Batch processing of entire directories easily

Simple terminal client for scripting

Nautilus extension for right-click file conversion

It can be used at the terminal as well as with the GTK interface, The GUI is very simple to use, you simply load the file and select the preset. Video purists may be disappointed by the limited user control in the GUI, and the not so great HD quality, but the arista-transcode command in a terminal offers a few more options for tweaking.It is the GTK interface, however, which is probably of more interest to the majority of users, with its quick and easy conversion and wide choice of device settings. Considerably more presets are available from the web site in tar.gz format and they can be installed in a couple of clicks. You can download the binaries foe Linux from there in tar.gz but you may still have dependency issues, so I'd recommended following the procedure described below to obtain it from the nux-dextop repo.

Friday, 1 March 2013

Occasionally, the need arises to use something that is a little more powerful than a typical text editor like Beaver or Gedit etc, without having to open up a full blown IDE such as Eclipse, Netbeans or IntellJIDEA.There are plenty of decent free editors for Linux, probably more so than any other OS around, but one which seems to fall somewhere between an editor and an IDE is Komodo Edit from ActiveState.Promoted as a 'Free, feature-rich editor for JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl, on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows'Komodo Edit is very decently equipped with some nice features to be found hidden within its functionality. Support for Node.js is a recent addition and the full list is quite impressive.

Full debugging, code intelligence and editing for Python (including Python 3), PHP, Perl, Ruby, Tcl, XSLT and Node.js.Full code intelligence and editing for HTML (including HTML 5), JavaScript, CSS (including CSS 3), XML, XUL, and templates (ie. Twig, EJS, epMojo, RHTML, Django, Mason, Smarty, Template Toolkit).Komodo Edit has editing for dozens of other languages, including C/C++, JSON, SQL, Erlang, CoffeeScript, LESS, SCSS and others.Add to that Fast Open, Vi key bindings and a Toolbox and you have an extremely useful editor for your web projects.Note, you will have to have the languages you wish to use installed on your system before they become available in Komodo.To install Komodo Edit on your Centos 6/RHEL box first go to the ActiveState site and download the Linux version to your home directory.Change privileges and move to the opt directory$ sudo su# cd /opt/Untar the downloaded tar file.# tar xvf /home/<user_name>/Komodo-Edit-8.0.1-12353-linux-x86.tar.gz

(or x86_64) Move into /opt/Komodo-Edit-8.0.1-12353-linux-x86

# cd Komodo-Edit-8.0.1-12353-linux-x86/

(or whatever version you use) Run the install shell script# ./install.shYou will go through a series of questions with an option to change the install directory, change this to '/opt/komodo'. When the process is complete you will be given a $PATH variable which you can put in to your /home/<user>/.bashrc file# vi /home/<user>/.bashrc

To add it to your right click context menu if it isn't already there you should just right click on any text file and browse to /usr/local/bin/komodo.exe - this should add it.There are a wide range of Plugins, Extensions and Add-ons available including an API to write your own if you wish.If you use it with a Lamp server stack, Komodo Edit makes a decent web development tool, with a handy preview either in a Komodo tab or using your installed browsers and a mapping to your server which you can set up in the preferences dialogue, along with Remote Servers, Stackato and much more.

Overall, Komodo Edit makes a very useful addition to your Linux Desktop and while it is not a replacement for the likes of Eclipse, you will almost certainly find features of it that make it invaluable for quite a few tasks.

I would definitely recommend giving it a try if you are looking for a development tool to fill in certain gaps in your armoury.